The Island Walkers (37 page)

In the bottom of the box were larger objects: pliers, a scaling knife, an old reel with black line, a gill-chain, a book with a tattered jacket, all smelling a little musty. He took out the book,
The Thirty-Nine Steps
by John Buchan. His father hadn’t been much of a reader, and he’d been surprised to find the novel, though Alf hadn’t actually opened it until several years after the drowning. The photographs were just where Alf had first found them, in an envelope tucked in the centre of the book. He took them out and laid them on the bench.

The pictures had been taken on one of the fishing trips his father had gone on with his old pal Shorty Bigwood. There was Shorty, with a beer bottle in one hand and a fishing pole in the other, mugging like an escaped schoolboy. And there was his father, standing near the stern of a beached rowboat, his slim face as brown as an Indian’s, glowing with health and high spirits under his white hair. Alf guessed the photos had been taken some time after the war, perhaps only a year or two before he’d drowned. He picked out two photos and set
the rest aside. In the first, his father was standing beside on open rail car in whose shadowy interior a few people were sitting on benches. His father had a suitcase in one hand, and had turned towards the car to help a woman negotiate the rather long step down from the car to the platform. This woman was tall, with cropped hair and round, dark glasses she might have worn to ward off the sun, though Alf couldn’t shake the notion she was blind; it had something to do with the uncertainty of her smile, as if she were eager not to give offence by the burden she had placed on others. In the second picture, his father was sitting up to his bare chest in water, directing a wincing smile at the camera, while the woman in dark glasses sat on the steep, stony beach behind him, near the wild, white roots of a fallen tree. She wore a bathing suit; her folded legs looked pale and shapely, and above the bodice of her bathing suit the tops of her breasts were just visible. Alf had no idea who this woman was. When he’d first discovered the photos he’d been intrigued, and a little shocked, but he had still reserved judgment. He’d never had an inkling that his father had been involved with any woman save his mother. But now, studying the pictures, he felt sure: his father, in his early sixties, had had an affair with a woman at least a decade younger than himself, a woman who might have been blind. He found a magnifying glass and examined the woman’s face. She had a strong chin and a small mouth. She was handsome rather than pretty, and in her posture — it had something to do with her straight back and the lift of her face — was a bemused pride. Alf moved the glass over his father’s face, which was slightly averted from the sunlight. There was a smile in his father’s face — a kind of smirk — that suggested the two of them, his father and the woman, were united in a common knowledge.
They were together
. It was as clear as if they’d been holding hands.

You devil, Alf thought. He felt as if he had understood nothing about his father until this minute, and even now his father seemed to retreat further into strangeness. What other secrets had he kept? He examined his father’s face, at once so familiar and so distant. No son ever sees his father clearly. There is always a distorting glare that
exaggerates or diminishes what is there, that leaves areas hidden that might not be hidden to anyone else, and reveals secrets warped in the deep eddies of old emotions.
His father had done what he, Alf, had done
. This realization charged Alf with a roguish excitement. After a fashion, his father’s sin justified his own, for it was simply what men did. “You old devil,” he said out loud.

At the same time, as if he were a boy opening a door he would later wish he had never touched, he heard the long echo of betrayal.

31

“
YOU WANTA GO SEE RON
?”

“Who?”

“You know, Ron,” Billy said. His eyes had grown sleepy-sly, looking at Jamie sideways. “The Candy Man.”

They were walking up Shade between the stores. At the mention of the Candy Man, the whole street suddenly became dangerous, the sunshine brighter, the salt stains on the sidewalk whiter. He’d seen the old man once, in the
A
&
P
, when he was with his mother. Jamie had hid behind her coat as she pushed their cart past the end of the aisle where the old man stood squinting at the shelves in a way that showed his teeth.

“I don’t wanta go there,” he said in a muffled voice.

“He said I should ask you.”

Jamie said nothing, though he was shocked at the idea that the old man was thinking about him. It was like God thinking about you — “We’re always in God’s thoughts,” his mother said — but it was like God upside down, a
bad
thinking. The old man might be thinking about him right now, he might be sitting in his old brown kitchen looking at his candies and thinking about Jamie. It put an icy
feeling in his stomach. They crossed Bridge to Jarrod’s Shoes. Outside the store, a line of boots was arranged on a table, one of each kind. Instantly excited, Billy picked up a boy’s black rubber boot. At the heel was a little red rubber spur. Jamie, too, was intrigued — boots with spurs! — and as they examined the boot, passing it back and forth, they didn’t notice that Mr. Jarrod had come out, not until a voice roared. Looking up, Jamie saw Mr. Jarrod’s round face with its little moustache just like the cork smudge Jamie’s mother had marked under his nose at Halloween. “You bloody Indian,” he yelled, tearing the boot out of Billy’s hands. He looked only at Billy, yelled only at Billy, as if Jamie wasn’t there. “If I catch you around here again I’ll call the police.”

They ran up the street and around the corner of the last store, where the road fell to a flat place by the river. Billy stomped up and down with gritted teeth, his eyes crazy-blind. Jamie stayed away from him.

“I’ll kill him,” Billy said in a strangled voice. He stomped off to the river and spat at it. After a while they went along the river. They heaved in chunks of frozen snow, and watched them darken and bob away like little icebergs.

It seemed cold and unhappy by the Shade, the current hurrying by with a faint licking sound. Jamie looked upstream, past the dam where his grandfather had drowned, past the rail trestle to the edge of the pine forest where he and Billy had tried to cut the Christmas tree. The old man’s house was that way, hidden from him now by the trees, but he could sense it there, waiting for him. “I gotta go home,” he said.

As they came back, they saw a black dog having a crap. It had all four feet bunched together and was straining away with a funny look on its face, while a reddish turd hung down behind. When the dog was finished, they went over and had a look. Then Billy went off and picked up an empty cigarette packet that had blown into a bush. He went over to the poo and, using the packet like a little shovel, cut away a portion of the poo, scooped it up, and started back towards
the stores. Following behind, Jamie kept asking what he was doing, but he was afraid he knew what Billy was doing, he was going after Mr. Jarrod with a piece of dog poo. But Billy didn’t do that. He walked past the door of the store, right up to the line of boots on the table, and dumped the poo into the biggest boot. They ran like hell, around the corner, across the bridge, down the bank to a place underneath the bridge. And there, on the bare, frozen earth, safe from all big people, they stomped back and forth, whooping their heads off.

32

PENNY, GINNY, AND BRENDA
were in Ginny’s big bedroom, with its framed pictures of ballerinas in pink-and-lime tutus, and a pink frill — like a giant’s tutu — around the dressing table. They were having a sleepover. Ginny’s mother and father had gone out for an hour. “We have to be quick,” Ginny said. It was Penny’s first time with the Bare-Naked Club. Ginny looked at Penny with that secretly amused smile, as if she found her a bit backward, but nice just the same. Brenda was sitting on the bed, unbuckling her shoes.

Watching herself in the mirror, Ginny unbuttoned her blouse. An excitement was in the air. Penny wasn’t sure she liked it, this feeling she was on the verge of things she didn’t know about, wasn’t supposed to do.

“C’mon, don’t be shy.”

Sitting on the edge of a chair, Penny bent to her shoes. She
was
shy. She took baths by herself now, not with Jamie like she had when she was little. She didn’t even like her mother to see her now, with no clothes on. Sometimes, when she got undressed in her room, she could hardly stand having no clothes on. The air on her — all over her
— seemed to be gently touching her,
there
and
there
, where she hardly dared touch herself.

She was breathing a bit harder now. The other girls were down to their underwear. Under her white cotton undershirt, Ginny had bumps where her breasts had started to grow. Penny couldn’t keep her eyes off them.

“C’mon, you’re getting behind,” Ginny said. She slid her underpants down her long legs and stepped out of them with a little laugh.

Penny took off her undershirt. On the bed behind Ginny, Brenda was already bare-naked. She was running strands of her hair through her fingers and staring absently at Penny. When she discovered Penny looking back, her face went blank.

“Take off your panties,” Ginny said.

Penny did as she was told and sat with her shoulders scrunched up and her hands between her legs. A shivering was going up and down her legs and through her shoulders and she couldn’t take her eyes off Ginny’s bare chest.

“Come look at yourself in the mirror,” Ginny said.

They were all at the mirror now. Ginny and Brenda were laughing and hardly able to stand straight: feeling each other’s smoothness against their skins. Penny looked at herself in the glass, at her nonexistent breasts puckering in her thin chest, and at her straggly brown hair that was neither straight nor curly, and at her face with its wide blue eyes, looking back at her as if she — that bare-naked girl in the mirror — were looking at Penny and wondering what she was doing out there, not joining in the fun.

Later, after Mr. and Mrs. Lamport came home, they made popcorn — Penny had a special, measured amount in her own bowl, no butter — and ate it up in Ginny’s room while they leafed through old magazines. Later, in the dark, Penny lay on her side in the little bed that had been Ginny’s when Ginny’s sister Ella was at home, listening to the other girls talk in the big bed. They were chatting about boys, and it was all a bit alien to her. They seemed to have
noticed and thought about so much that she hadn’t — who liked whom, who was good-looking — though when Ginny said she was pretty sure Bobby Tuckett “had a crush” on Penny, Penny went hot under the sheets. “No,” she cried, really outraged. “I
hate
Bobby Tuckett! “Why?” Ginny said. “He’s so cute!” Penny fell silent, stunned by the idea Bobby Tuckett liked her. Stunned by the idea that he was
cute
.

After some time there was silence, the scraping of a snowplough. Penny had started to drift off when she heard an eruption of giggling and scuffling from the other bed. Then Ginny said in a loudish whisper, “Oh darling!” which set the two of them, Ginny and Brenda, snickering into their pillows. Then there was silence again, and more scuffling, and Penny heard Brenda say, “I don’t like tongues.”

“Shhh …,” Ginny said.

And Brenda said, “She’s asleep.”

“Is she?”

“I don’t think Bobby Tuckett likes her.”

“Sure he does,” Ginny said.

“No, he doesn’t. Who’s gonna like someone with diabetes?”

There was silence for a while. Then Penny heard Ginny say, “My mother says diabetics can’t have babies.”

In the morning, the other girls pressed close as Penny gave herself her needle. She felt odd at having to do it in front of them — her mother usually left her alone with her syringe — but they had asked if they could watch. Mrs. Lamport watched too, hovering nearby and saying, “Girls, pay attention now, she has to do this
every
morning” — the three of them peering as Penny stuck her needle into the little bottle of insulin, plunged it right through the rubber top, and drew back the plunger of the syringe to the right amount, thirty-four units, and pulled the needle out and brought its tip to the outside of her upper arm.